加油! Jia You!

As I ran along the hilly countryside, along the Great Wall Marathon course, many little kids and adults were yelling, "Jia you! (加油!) Jia you!" This literally means "add oil," but translates to "go! go! go!" It was kind of humorous because I would usually hear the crowds yell out "hello" to foreigners passing by, but then when they saw me, they would say, look a Chinese runner, and say, "加油!"

This was a pretty intense course, much of it uphill and on top of that there's the wall. The first time around, it wasn't so bad, kind of nice and my body was still relatively fresh, as it was in the first 5 miles that we "ran" the wall. In reality, its nearly impossible to run along Great Wall, so most of us just walked along, hoping not to fall off or trip and break a bone.

However, by mile 22ish, I was pretty tired and my legs were screaming in pain. I was cursing every step and was wondering if I could stop right there. I kept chugging along until the end of the wall and it was all downhill from there, literally.

It was the greatest feeling to cross the finish line and I got a nifty medal. Overall, it was an amazing, grueling experience, one that I probably will not do again, but highly recommend it!

On the stage with my medal!













You can see the wall along the hills.













In other news, the earthquake in Sichuan province is devastating, as I'm sure you've heard. Thankfully, I am up in the northeast, which very far away from the western province. Today, and the next two days, there are moments of silence at 2:28PM for the victims of the Earthquake. Also, if you would like to donate some money, the following are some good websites to check out:
http://tsinghuafoundation.org/earthquake08/index.html
http://www.us.tzuchi.org/usa/home.nsf/photonews/k11802
http://www.mercycorps.org/chinaearthquake/

May 20th, 10:53PM Addendum
Here is my result from the Great Wall Marathon

May 23rd, 12:37AM Addendum
This website has photos of me along the wall and the course, just click on the Great Wall Marathon on the left side and put in my bib number in the search engine: 544

Harder than the Antarctica Marathon?

With about a week and a half left before the Great Wall Marathon, I though I'd peruse some of the articles on the marathon, just to mentally prepare myself. When I came across a comment left by a previous runner who wrote, "I thought Antarctica was tough until I ran the Great Wall Marathon"

I was in a state in of utter disbelief. I mean, come on, we're talking about freaking Antarctica here. Its covered in ICE and Wikipedia has this to add, "Antarctica is the coldest, driest and windiest continent, and has the highest average elevation of all the continents." Oh my goodness, what have I gotten myself into?

In other news, we were on holiday last week for May Day so a bunch of us went camping at 5 Tiger Island. This island is actually a theme park, so it looked a bit odd that we had all our camping gear, looking for a spot along the beach. One of the tourists yelled out, "do you plan on living there?" Regardless, we had a grand ol' time which was accentuated with 朋友 (peng you, "friend" in Chinese), Michelle's boxer, who was super hyper, but not very good at fetching. 5 Tiger Island photo album here

Peng you "helping" collect firewood:













Matt, Michelle, James, Kevin, Peng You, and Jenny

Running with Sand

Well, as Matt pointed out, I really need to post something. But to be honest, there's not much happening these days. Time has been passing quickly and part of the reason is that I'm quite busy. My days have been filled with class hours, both teaching and Chinese class, tutors, meeting with students and lastly running.

I'm happy to report that training for the Great Wall Marathon is going pretty well. I just did long run of about 1 hr 40 minutes this past Saturday. I had been nervous about the marathon since I had a little bit less than 3 months to train for it, but I've had a nice time running in Jilin. I have a pretty good running path for my long runs along the Song Hua River, but I'm unsure of the distances, so just to be safe I've designated a mile to every 10 minutes that I run. While we've had some bouts of cold and snow, the weather hasn't been too shabby. Unfortunately, we are the throws of "sand storm season."

The way I look at it is that Mud Season:Vermont :: Sandstorm Season: Northeast China. So instead of seeing mud flaps everywhere, I'll see random people, especially children, with their heads engulfed in a weird pantyhose-netting type thing to block out the sand. I actually could use some sort of mask, since sometimes after finishing a run, I'll feel like I've tripped over someone buried in the beach and fallen face first into the sand. You know that gross feeling of bits of sand in your mouth, getting stuck in the crevices of your mouth and rubbing against your molars and gums, ugh!

Anyhoo, the run is less than 2 months away, yikes! I'm looking forward to it and hopefully I don't trip and fall off!

Home again

So I've done a pretty spotty job of updating my blog since the Gibbons experience, but so it goes. When the zip lining was over, Carolyn and I still needed an adrenaline rush, so we took a high speed boat from Huayxai to Luang Prabang. I was hesitant to do it because of all the warnings of crashing and whatnot, but what the heck, a 6 hour bumpy boat ride sounded a bit more appealing than an 18 hour bus ride.

Anyhoo, we had some pretty good adventures which included doing some Traditional fishing with some locals and meeting up with Matt in Luang Prabang. I finally put up all the pictures with captions when necessary and I split them up into albums of the cities/towns I visited: Go to pictures!

I've been back in Jilin now for a little over a week and its nice to be back. Its even nicer because I was dreading the cold weather upon returning to the NE, but so far its been very mild.

This past week has consisted of getting back into the swing of things, like teaching, studying, and now training for the Great Wall Marathon, which I foolishly signed up for in May. I have only given myself a little less than 3 months to train, but my goal is to finish, even if it does take me 6 hours.